Fri 16 Apr 2010

Shoo Polish?

Posted by anaglyph under Idiots, Skeptical Thinking, Stupidity, WooWoo
[19] Comments

Tetherd Cow Ahead celebrates World Homeopathy Awareness Week!

Well Acowlytes, I bet you didn’t think I could do it. I bet you didn’t think I could tie our old friends from ShooTag into homeopathy awareness week! But we have a saying around these parts: ‘Any man is liable to err but only a fool persists in error’. ((Cicero)) And with that thought in mind, a search on ‘Energetic Solutions’ (the company behind ShooTag) and ‘homeopathy’ throws up this link. ((Which shows us also that pet owners aren’t the only stupid people that these swindlers have gulled))

Yes folks, the people who brought you ShooTag, started out by attempting to foist on the world ‘homeopathic creams for stress reduction’. Strangely, this comes as no surprise to me.

Nothing seems to have come of this previous enterprise though – I can’t find a single other thing about it. One has to assume that they weren’t quite in the league of all the other con-artists out there. It does add one further arrow to my quiver though – the ShooTaggers are even more obviously in it for the money. They’ve found the rich seam that is gullible New Age woowoo and they’re mining it for all they’re worth.

On a slightly more disturbing note, I draw your attention to a comment on this post on a blog called The Dish. Melissa Rogers, CEO of ShooTag claims to be sending the tags to Africa, a country that has a crippling malaria problem:

We have sent our People -Mosquito tags to Africa and Haiti. We have Africa interested in purchasing our tags.

I’m pretty sure that this is nothing more than grandiose bragging on Ms Rogers’ part ((it’s proving to be a habit of hers)) (‘sending the tags to Africa’ and ‘having Africa interested in purchasing our tags’ means fuck all in any real sense), but if the ShooTag crowd are venturing into a territory that sees them offering protection against malaria, Dengue fever, Ross river virus, Yellow fever, West Nile virus and the host of other mosquito-borne diseases that kill over a million people every year, then they better have something more convincing than the claptrap they’ve trotted out so far. While they’re currently hoodwinking gullible pet owners they’re relatively inconsequential – if they cross the line into allowing people to die through their misleading claims, they will have more than my annoyance to deal with.






 

Wed 14 Apr 2010

Yes, It’s a Real Book

Posted by anaglyph under Hokum, Idiots, In The News, Skeptical Thinking, WooWoo
[5] Comments

Tetherd Cow Ahead celebrates World Homeopathy Awareness Week!



You don’t have to be a complete idiot to get the best out of it, but it really helps.






 

Tue 13 Apr 2010

Water Colours

Posted by anaglyph under In The News, Insane People, Skeptical Thinking, Stupidity, WooWoo
[8] Comments

Do you like these bottles of coloured water? Me too. I’ve always liked coloured bottles, and coloured glass and even stained-glass church windows. But little did I realize that it was not the visual pleasure that was at work on me, but the homeopathic effect of said items!

Here at Tetherd Cow Ahead, as we continue our support for World Homeopathy Awareness Week, ((I say ‘support’ in reference to the ‘awareness’ part of the process – I’m definitely up for bringing awareness of the stupidity of homeopathy to the attention of the world)) the boffins in the TCA labs have whipped up some potions that, believe it or not, have absolutely nothing absorbed in them except light! The homeopathic effect of merely the colour in these elixirs will cure you of everything from mild ennui to autism. I know, I know – hard to believe I could make up something quite so implausible and expect anyone to swallow it. (Hahahaha. Little joke there.)

Well, it probably won’t surprise you to find out that it wasn’t actually my idea at all. Over at The Institute of Life Energy Medicine you can buy ‘homeopathic colour remedies’ just like these (only not anywhere near as pretty) that promise all kinds of marvels.

How are the color remedies made?

Homeopathic color remedies are made by taking pure water in glass tumblers and placing them in the sun. Auspicious days are chosen such as the winter solstice and summer solstice, days of maximum and minimum light on which to make these remedies. The tumblers are placed in a quiet place without much commotion and colored theatrical gels or colored silks are placed on top of and around the glasses. The glasses are placed on small mirrors to maximize the color vibrating in the glass.

Trawling around the site will take you on a veritable guided tour of this kind of fruitloopery and you can finish up with a sobering reflection on just how much money is to be made from selling water that has been sitting in your backyard under a piece of coloured cellophane.

The colours all have particular ‘powers’ of course – red is the colour of ‘passion, violence and danger’ (oh surprise) and green is the colour of ‘the healing power of nature’ (yawn). ((Why are these people always so damn leaden and pedestrian. It’s magic for chrissakes! Show some imagination!)) The efficacies of these solutions, no matter what their ‘colour’ are all amorphous and diffuse; they help with ‘recovery from shock or illness’ or ‘detoxification’ or they ‘calm frayed nerves’. They are, unsurprisingly, most effective on the stock standard hard-to-pin-down vagaries of human existence – the vast grey area that provides so much nutrition for wacky beliefs to flourish. There isn’t one concrete or unequivocal promise on the entire site.

The contra-indications for use are particularly amusing:

Yellow:

This remedy should not be used by people who are overly confident or have an excessively developed ego. It should not be used at night.

Why? What could possibly happen – they might get even more confident and their ego might EXPLODE? It’s a bottle of water for Pete’s sake.

I’m not going to dwell on this too long. The Institute of Life Medicine site is really just another flavour of Special One Drop Liquid, only not quite as entertaining.

I just want to finish with one question directed to Ms Wauters: What happens if I drink a glass of water that’s been sitting on the table outside my studio in the sun? Since sunlight is a combination of all colours, does that mean I’ll I be cured of all my ailments?

In the bizarre reality of the world of homeopathic colour remedies, it seems pretty logical to me.

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Ms Wauters also spruiks homeopathic ‘sound’ remedies, but I tire – maybe another day we can find out why Middle C ‘promotes grounding, connection and engagement’.

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Sun 11 Apr 2010

Science With Dr Werner

Posted by anaglyph under Idiots, Science, Skeptical Thinking, Stupidity, WooWoo
[14] Comments

This week is, apparently, World Homeopathy Awareness Week ((… as I discovered over at Cubiks Rube. Thanks writerJames)) so I’m performing my skeptical duty by making you aware of it (wow – even just thinking about homeopathy has made me feel better this morning!)

In the past I have been harsh on homeopathy so in honour of WHAW I’m going to allow some equal time for its proponents. It’s the least I can do. Let me present for you Dr Charlene Werner (a doctor of homeopathy, I presume), who will, using her own words, guide you through the science behind how homeopathy works:

Did you stick it out to the end, or did your laughing fit cause you to hyperventilate like I did? I had to take a whole bottle of homeopathic sedatives to calm me down.

To recap what we have learned from Dr Werner:

• The total mass of the universe is about the same as something the size of a bowling ball (ie, virtually none at all), and is not the 8 × 1052 kg ((Just in case you’re not good with numerical powers, the language description of that would be ‘AN AMOUNT SO FUCKING HUGE THAT YOU CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE IT’)) generally accepted by physicists. ((Estimation based on measured stellar density. There is, as always, dispute on the accuracy of this figure, but I think we can safely say that it’s nearer ‘A FUCKING HUGE AMOUNT’ than it is near Dr Werner’s preferred quantity of ‘none’))

• Einstein’s famous mass/energy equivalence formula is wrong and it should read E=C2. Many of you will see at once that this is in conflict with the ShooTag reworking of it as E=M¾ and so Dr Werner is possibly in error here.

• Stephen Hawkings was ‘sent to Earth by God in His Infinite Wisdom to bring us String Theory.’ This is evidently a different person to Stephen Hawking, the great physicist and cosmologist, who was born naturally of human parents, and, although a proponent of String Theory, can take no credit for its genesis.

• This supernatural Stephen Hawkings dude also discovered a new kind of particle shaped like ‘little U-ies’ that ‘work by vibration’ (no I don’t know what the hell she’s on about either).

• E=MC2 is an expression of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

• Protons, electrons and neutrons, despite all scientific knowledge to the contrary, are made of energy and not matter.

• The ‘definition’ of disease is ‘Transforming your energy into something different’ and has nothing to do with a pathogenic biological process as is generally thought.

• If your neighbour’s dog craps on your lawn, the best way to deal with the matter is to bomb his house. ((Did anyone else start to wonder at this point whether this woman has some serious issues…?))

So there we have it. I hope your awareness of homeopathy is suitably heightened. During the next few days we will be celebrating further illuminating homeopathic moments.

Your health!






 

Wed 7 Apr 2010

Pork Pie Chart?

Posted by anaglyph under Cow Matters, CowBlogTech, Hmmm..., Numbers
[10] Comments



Every now and then out of curiosity I check the server statistics for Tetherd Cow to see who visits, from where, and what they’re interested in. Mostly it’s boring. Occasionally it’s baffling. This is one of those times. I mean, veronica, rasputin and shoo tag scam, sure no problem. Famous mirrors, yup. Old ‘adds’ – I guess.

But fanny as the number one term? Really? Just go over to the side bar search button, Acowlytes, and do a search for fanny. You get one hit – this post. And yet the number one search term bringing people to Tetherd Cow Ahead this last month, with 71 requests, is fanny. What the crap is that about?

And as for girl sucks cow singsong…





 

Tue 6 Apr 2010

Time Bandit

Posted by anaglyph under Idiots, Spam Observations, Stupidity
[9] Comments

On the weekend, as our clocks were moved back one hour for Daylight Savings, my new friend Jimmie McDowell wrote to me with his exciting news:

From: Jimmie Mcdowell
Subject: Your watch will overshadow all the other timepieces.
Date: 4 April 2010 8:33:58 AM AEST
To: reverend[at]tetherdcow.com

I don’t trust Jimmie. I think he’s sneakily trying to sell me one of these:







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Sundial in thyme garden at Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Photographed June 17, 2007 at 12:21 solar time (13:21 Daylight Savings Time). Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License from Wikimedia Commons

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